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The Boys from Baghdad High
|language=English Arabic with subtitles |executive_producer=Alan Hayling Karen O'Connor Hans Robert Eisenhauer Sheila Nevins |producer=Ivan O'Mahone Laura Winter |co-producer=Alex Cooke |asst_producer=Fallah Al Rubaie Zaid H. Fahmi |sup_produce=Lisa Heller |editor=Richard Guard Johnny Burke |story_editor= |location=Baghdad, Iraq |cinematography= |camera=single-camera |runtime=90 minutes |picture_format=DV |first_aired=8 January 2008 |related= |website=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/7170477.stm |production_website=http://www.hbo.com/docs/docuseries/baghdadhigh/index.html }} The Boys from Baghdad High is a British/Iraqi television documentary film. It premiered in the United Kingdom at the 2007 Sheffield Doc/Fest, before airing on BBC Two on 8 January 2008. It also aired in many other countries including France, Australia, the United States, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands. It documents the lives of four Iraqi schoolboys over the course of one year in the form of a video diary. The documentary was filmed by the boys themselves, who were given video cameras for the project. Produced by Ivan O'Mahone and Laura Winter of Renegade Pictures and StoryLabTV, for the United Kingdom's British Broadcasting Corporation, Home Box Office in the United States, and the Franco-German network Arte, The Boys from Baghdad High was also directed by O'Mahone and Winter, executive produced by Alan Hayling and Karen O'Connor for the BBC and Hans Robert Eisenhauer for ARTE. For the edited HBO version, Sheila Nevins was credited as an additional executive producer, Victoria Ford and Geof Bartz were consulting editors, and Lisa Heller the supervising producer. It stars Hayder Khalid, Mohammad Raed, Anmar Refat and Ali Shadman. The visual cards that punctuate the hand-held footage were created by Glowfrog Studios, London. The Boys from Baghdad High has been well received by the mass media, and has received many positive reviews in many countries describing it as "notable", "fascinating", "moving", "appealing" and "exhilarating and chilling". It was nominated for two awards at different film festivals, was named the Best News and Current Affairs film at the European Independent Film Festival, and won the Premier Prize at the Sandford St. Martin Trust Awards. It was also nominated for an award from Amnesty International, and the Radio Times Readers Award. Production The Boys from Baghdad High was co-produced and co-directed by Ivan O'Mahoney and Laura Winter. Prior to working on the film, O'Mahoney had been a United Nations peacekeeper in Bosnia and an attorney in the Netherlands, and had worked on the documentary How to Plan a Revolution. He had also worked for the BBC, Channel 4, CNN, and PBS in Ethiopia, Iraq, Sudan and Colombia. Winter had previously worked for CNN, 60 Minutes, CBS Evening News, CBS Radio, the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Daily News in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan and Iraq. The Boys from Baghdad High was the first time she was credited as a director. O'Mahoney and Winter began working on the film in 2006. They wanted to make a documentary about "the people never seen on the evening news, of presidents, prime ministers, generals and militants ... who claim to know something of Iraq's future". They decided to concentrate on what they viewed as the "real source of Iraq's future" – teenagers. "I wanted to tell the story of Iraq in a different way," said Winter. "As journalists, we do stories about kids and teenagers, but we don't hear from them. If you go to the UN reports, they are just a number and that's it." O'Mahoney was a little more reticent, however. He had recently worked in Iraq but did not wish to return due to the Civil war and the deteriorating condition of the country. When it was decided that they would use a school as a backdrop to the story, which could also be used to provide a chronological narrative, O'Mahoney and Winter realised that it would be too dangerous for the students to be seen with either a Western or Iraqi camera crew because it would draw too much attention to them. It was decided that the students would film the documentary themselves. Winter chose Tariq bin Ziad High School for Boys to source the students from. It is a school which was still holding onto the notion of a united Iraq, in contrast to the racially and religiously segregated country it was becoming. Having worked in Iraq in 2003, Winter knew that the Baghdad district Karrada was very mixed and integrated with high numbers of Shiites and Christians. She asked one of her translators who had attended the school if he would contact the principal. Initially the school was suspicious of their intentions, but decided to trust the judgement of Winter's translator. Principal Ra'ad Jawad selected eight boys to take part in the documentary because because he knew they would be discreet, would not get bored, and would remain committed to filming their lives for a year. Jawad travelled to London to meet the producers and he was trained how to operate the video cameras that the boys would be given. The cameras and tapes were sent into Iraq via the BBC News department, which were then passed onto the school. Jawad and two Iraqi associate producers trained the boys how to use the cameras. Two months into filming, four of the boys dropped out of the project, leaving Hayder Khalid, Anmar Refat, Ali Shadman, and Mohammad Raed. The producers took the boys' security very seriously. O'Mahoney explained: "boys were under very strict security rules when they were filming. They were told not to act as news cameramen. They were not allowed to film in the street. They could only film at school or at home, in secured environments." Nevertheless, Haydar filmed outside at night on occasion, explaining he had to be careful as people are robbed if they are seen carrying even a cell phone. On New Year's Eve, he and his friend celebrate with a bonfire in his friend's back yard, but after debating whether a noise they hear is fireworks or gunfire, Hayder rushes home. When another boy is driven to school one morning, they reach a special forces checkpoint. He explains, "if they see me with a camera they will take me to prison, they'll think I'm a terrorist who wants to bomb them." Receiving the tapes for editing also proved difficult for Winter and O'Mahoney. They had to rely on reporters from different news agencies, especially those in the BBC News's Baghdad Bureau high-risk team, to bring the tapes out of Iraq. When the curfews were enforced, weeks passed before they were given new tapes because it was impossible for anyone to leave their homes or the country. O'Mahoney and Winter never even met the boys because they were undertaking such a high-risk assignment – as Mohammed noted in the documentary, if the soldiers at the roadsite security check-point found his camera, he was likely to be arrested under the suspicion of terrorism. The first time Winter and O'Mahoney met one of the film's subjects was at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, nearly a year after the filming had completed, and only then did they meet Ali because his family had relocated to the US. The producers had previously tried to get the boys visas to enter the UK for a screening in London, but the British Government denied them entry. Over 300 hours of footage was filmed by the students, and along with occasional footage from the two Iraqi associate producers, it was transcribed, translated and edited into a 90-minute film. Of the footage which was not included in the documentary was Saddam Hussein's execution, which Anwar had filmed from the internet, from start to finish. "We had a big debate about whether or not that should go into the film," O'Connor explained. Water continued, "it was one of those things where to see it, it just gets you. But we had to ask ourselves, does it help our story? No." Footage which was nearly edited out included the scene where Anwar had to siphon petrol out of the family car for the house's generator, and explain that he needed to do it because their family was "so poor". "That's tough," commented Water, "because that's a dishonor to his family." Distribution The Boys from Baghdad High received its world première at the 2007 Sheffield Doc/Fest, an annual film festival for documentary productions held in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. It then premièred on television in the UK on BBC Two, a terrestrial television network, on 8 January 2008 at 9:00 p.m. as part of the This World series. It was broadcast in France and Germany on the joint-venture terrestrial network Arte on 18 March 2008 at 9:00 p.m., with the French title Bagdad, le bac sous les bombes, and Die Jungs von der Bagdad-High in Germany. . In the US the documentary was screened on 29 April 2008 at the Tribeca Film Festival, where Winter met Ali (who had relocated to the US since completing the film) for the first time. It aired on the premium cable network HBO as Baghdad High on 4 August 2008 at 9:00 p.m. The documentary also aired in Australia on the Special Broadcasting Service, Canada on CBC Newsworld, and in the Netherlands on VPRO. The BBC made the documentary available for viewers from the UK to stream using its BBC iPlayer service for seven days after the initial broadcast. A Region 2 DVD of the documentary can be obtained, although it can only be purchased directly from the BBC and is not available in stores. Reception The Boys from Baghdad High was well received from the moment it premièred. It was nominated for a Youth Jury Award at the 2007 Sheffield Doc/Fest, it was shortlisted for an Amnesty International 2008 UK Media Award in the category for Television Documentary and Docudramas, and the European Independent Film Festival named it the Best News and Current Affairs film. It was nominated for the Readers' Award in the Radio Times, and in May 2008 it won the Premiere Prize at the Sandford St. Martin Trust Awards, which acknowledges excellence in religious broadcasting. The Trust's chairman and former BBC Head of Religious Broadcasting Colin Morris said of the documentary, "We saw the way faith breaks into secular life in the chaos of present day Iraq. Coming from different ethnic and religious backgrounds the boys showed that despite the war their daily preoccupations were much the same as those of teenage boys the world over – girlfriends, parents, sport, fashion, exams, music. Would their friendship survive? Ultimately the programme confronted British viewers with the question: 'What in God's name are we doing there?'" At the Tribeca Film Festival, it was short-listed for the 2008 World Documentary Feature Competition, competing against eleven other non-fiction films for Best Documentary Film and Best New Documentary Filmmaker. When the documentary aired in the UK, overnight viewing figures showed that it was watched by 600,000 viewers, which was three percent of the total television audience for that timeslot. Reviews for The Boys from Baghdad High were generally favourable. The Washington Post s Paul Farhi said, "HBO has carved a niche as the TV home of some of the most compelling programs about the Iraq war... Baghdad High does no harm to HBO's burgeoning war credibility." Thomas Sutcliffe of The Independent said, "its storyline was governed not by a tick-list of stock narrative dilemmas and secrets but the cruel uncertainties that occupation and insurgency have brought to Baghdad." PopMatters rated the documentary 8 out of 10. However, Mark A. Perigard of the Boston Herald commented, "After the time you’ve viewer invested, it’s not nearly satisfying enough. For all the questions this fascinating film raises, it might as well be written in sand." Bill Weber of Slant Magazine said, "putting the trials of MTV reality-show prima donnas in perspective, the middle-class quartet will be relatable to this BBC/HBO production's audience in their easy embrace of Western kid stuff... Directors Ivan O'Mahoney and Laura Winter balance portraying an everyday sense of the adolescents' wartime anxiety with the more commonplace juvenile relief." That juvenile relief was commented on by many – moments such as Mohammed's "tender concern for a household mouse he 'adopts'" in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post also raised comparisons with MTV reality shows. "One observable and welcome difference between the Iraqi boys and nearly any high school-aged American on reality (or "reality") programming is the former's lack of performance. The Baghdadis, luckily spared cultural phenomena like such as Laguna Beach or The Paper, speak and act candidly and without melodrama. In The New York Times, Mike Hale wrote, "Suddenly Ali is holding a large knife. 'He’s being naughty!' Mohammed says. Ali holds the knife near Mohammed and says, a little too unemotionally: 'Allah! This is the first hostage. I’m going to slaughter him this way.' Mohammed tells him to stop fooling around. Ali relents. 'O.K. He just got a presidential pardon. He can live.'". Reuters also commented on this, and more banter between Ali and Mohammed. "Ali is shown making a pretend hostage video with Mohammad, and then teasing his friend for his smelly feet. 'If Chemical Ali really wanted to destroy the north he should have fired a rocket with Mohammad's socks in it'." At the Q&A session following a screening at the Tribeca Film Festival, one audience member, a new recruit to the United States Marine Corps, told Ali, who had also attended, "I finally know what life is like behind those walls and what you guys are like, and it's been really, really fantastic." Entertainment Weekly, LA Weekly, Variety, and the New York Observer also praised the film. Many reviewers pointed out the similarities between the Iraqi boys and those from Western cultures. "Like students at any high school, they joke around, play soccer, listen to Tupac Shakur, and try to study", said Patrick Huguenin of New York's Daily News. "Much of the film shows the boys doing what most teenagers do -- playing sports, dancing in their bedrooms, playing around at school." said Michelle Nicholls of Reuters. Farhi said, "They mostly struggle to be like teenagers everywhere. They listen to American rap music (one boy while studying the Koran), play basketball and soccer, roughhouse or just hang out... The boys begin to stress out over their final exams. Failure means they'll have to repeat their senior year." He continued by saying, "Viewers will likely watch this concluding passage with a sense of relief. Worrying about tests and grades, after all, seems normal, the kind of stuff teenagers should be preoccupied with." Mark A. Perigard of the Boston Herald commented, "despite the cultural differences, Ali, Anmar, Hayder and Mohammad will seem instantly familiar to anyone who has spent time around a teenage boy. They like to wrestle each other, love Western music, dream big and have trouble buckling down in school." Peter Scarlet, Artistic Director at the Tribeca Film Festival said, "What's fascinating about the film that resulted is how very familiar and ordinary these kids are-they're not really all that different from your own teenagers or the kids you went to school with. The kids of Baghdad High also open us up to a very different sense of life in Iraq than what we've been seeing on the nightly news for five years." The depiction of the differences between the two cultures were also commented on. Farsi described the school as having "all the charm of an abandoned prison", and continued with, "Visiting a friend who lives a few hundred yards away involves running a potential gantlet of kidnappers and snipers; getting to school on time means navigating military checkpoints. Before a big exam, teachers frisk their students for explosives," while Perigard said, "at night, their neighborhoods are riddled with gunfire and explosions", and Huguenin, "American teens wouldn't recognize other scenes showing how life slips into a heavily regulated series of checkpoints and curfews." Hale said, "The way the boys can tell without looking whether it’s an Apache or a Chinook helicopter overhead. The way the curtains are always drawn. The level of physical contact and affection among the men, which would be alien to American sensibilities." There were complaints however that the documentary did not depict enough of the political aspects of the Iraqi War. "The 90-minute documentary doesn't say much about the larger issues facing Iraq, but it does capture some small and captivating human stories... They live in what one boy describes as 'the most dangerous city on Earth.' You don't see much of Iraq's violence in "High," but you surely feel its gravity and their dread." Perigard said "is a personal story, not a political one", while Weber said, "Words on the country's combative political factions or the American agenda are scarce in Baghdad High". Hale commented, "While the boys talk frequently about violence and despair, they rarely discuss politics or ethnic differences (with the exception of Anmar, the Christian) and they almost never directly address the American presence. We do hear some parental opinions, which are surprisingly neutral. One mother says: 'We shouldn’t blame the Americans for everything. There is something wrong with us too'." References External links * * Baghdad High at HBO * * Category:Iraq War documentaries Category:Iraq War in television Category:Political documentaries Category:BBC television documentaries Category:American documentary films Category:French documentary films Category:German documentary films